Getting string array sections using integers

Question

First off i'm working with OpenNLP however knowledge on it isn't needed but might be useful.

A string is inputted into the method FindName

String input = "Billy Smith the chicken crossed the road to visit Fred Jones";

it is processed by a tokenizer to give the input for the namefinder:

String[] tokenized = "Billy","Smith","the","chicken","crossed","the","road","to","visit","Fred","Jones";

which is searched for a name, the results are given as two strings which is produced in a "for" loop

 "[0..2) person","[9..11) person"

now how can i put the original names("Billy Smith" and "Fred Jones") into a arraylist or similar string array?

so far i have tried:

for(Span s: nameSpans){
                            numbers = s.toString().replace("[", "");
//is "[0..2) person" and "[9..11) person"
                            sect = numbers.split("\\) ");
                        }

                        int x;
                        for(x=0;x<sect.length;x++){
                        if(x%2 == 0){
                            String[] numb = sect[x].split("..");

                            int n;
                            int first, second;
                            first = Integer.parseInt(numb[0]);
                            second = Integer.parseInt(numb[1]);
                            for(n=first;n<second;n++){
                            if(sentence.hashCode() == n){
                              name.add(sentence[n]);
                            }

but have had no luck.

Answer 1

There is a built in static method to the Span object that does what you want. See this answer. OpenNLP Name Entity Recognizer output

Answer 2

It can be done by parsing the output strings as integers and then creating a string array with the original input string to create words which i could then call with the correct numbers therefor giving the full names and any middle names in between.

the working code:

for(Span s: nameSpans){
                            String a = s.toString().replace("[", "").replace(")", "");
                           String[] b = a.split("\\s");
                           String[] c = b[0].split("\\..");
                           int first = Integer.parseInt(c[0]);
                           int second = Integer.parseInt(c[1]);
                           String[] word = input.split("\\s");
                           int n;
                           for(n=first;n<second;n++){
                           names.add(word[n]);
                           System.out.println(word[n]);
                           }
                        }